"That's what makes me sad: Life is so different from books."

The conversation begins with small talk before Marianne acknowledges their past. “Funny, our meeting like this again,” she says. In response, Ferdinand gets the years wrong since the last time they were together -- not “four years,” as he says, but “five-and-a-half,” according to Marianne. After that, Marianne asks if he is married, and Ferdinand says he is, but that he has “lost interest” in his wife. When Marianne asks why he doesn’t get a divorce, he replies that he is “too lazy.” Then Ferdinand utters the hinge line: “Like you pointed out once: To want something, you have to be alive.” More small talk, with Marianne providing a couple of lackluster responses, after which Ferdinand says, “You don’t feel like talking about yourself,” and Marianne says, “No.” Once Ferdinand establishes that Marianne is single, he shifts the conversation. “Mysterious as ever, I see,” and Marianne, though she never said it (Ferdinand did), replies, “Like I said, I just don’t like talking about myself.” Ferdinand says “Very well. Silence, then,” and Marianne turns on the radio.

I turn on the radio and, as in Pierre le fou, what comes out is a news report. But instead of a Viet Cong attack on a French garrison, it is a rolled over camper van on the Coquihalla.

“Awful, isn’t it? It’s so anonymous,” I say, like Marianne says to Ferdinand of the Viet Cong attack.

“What is?” says the hitcher, as Ferdinand says to Marianne.

“They say four passengers, and it means nothing to us,” I say, paraphrasing Marianne. “But each is a human being, and we don’t even know who they are. If it is parents and children, grandparents and children, a touring band or a carpool of cowboys. If they prefer books or video games. We know nothing about them. All they say is four people pulled from the wreckage.”

In Pierre le fou, Marianne follows her commentary with a discussion of photographs. “You see this frozen image of a guy with a caption underneath. Maybe he was a coward. Maybe he was a nice guy. But at the moment it was taken, no one can say who he really was, what he was thinking about. His wife? His mistress? The past? The future? Basketball? No one will ever know.”

“That’s life for you,” says Ferdinand.

(It is here that we see Ferdinand coming to life again. Just as Mona came back to life when she stepped from the ocean and said to the truck driver who picked her up -- “I am”) 

“That’s what makes me sad: Life is so different from books,” says Marianne. “I wish it were the same: clear, logical, organized. Only it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is. Much more than people think.”

“No, Pierrot.”

“For the last time, my name’s Ferdinand.”

“I know, but you can’t sing ‘My Friend Ferdinand’,” sings Marianne.

“Yes, you can. You just have to want to, Marianne.”

At this point we hear the first notes of the song that introduces the transition to the next scene -- the daylight on Marianne’s face, and then her and Ferdinand/Pierrot’s lives as impoverished apartment-dwelling revolutionaries. But in the meantime, Ferdinand/Pierrot and Marianne remain in the car...

“I want to,” says Marianne in response to Ferdinand/Pierrot.

Like the song, Marianne’s “I want to” indicates the verbal transition, with Ferdinand/Pierrot’s return to life, replying “Me too, Marianne” to everything Marianne desires. Not Ferdinand/Pierrot’s return to life in the singular sense, but a life in relation (to another).

Of course no such transition is available to the hitcher and me. And it is in this recognition that my reference is no longer toPierre le fou, nor Vagabond, but the “No” that periodically punctuates Sophie Calle’s commentary in Double Blind (No Sex Last Night) (1992): the story of another driving trip, this time across the United States, with Calle seeking her own relational transition, which her younger travelling companion, Greg Shephard, continually denies her -- until one night he doesn’t, and the tone of the work, like the car’s transmission, shifts.

I want a similar shift with the hitcher, but without the eros of Pierre le fou and Double Blind, and without the existential exasperation of Vagabond. Something closer to two artists moving through an art gallery, looking at the world through Art’s eyes, but who happen to be in a car driving up an old country road. “To want something, you have to be alive,” says Ferdinand, and I want to be alive right now, too, only it appears that in wanting to be alive I have to want something else, first, and that is a condition to which I have no control over, a condition that I alone cannot change.

"Where you from, man?"

We pass a farm house. In the driveway a middle-aged woman and a teenager play catch with a soft ball, while a middle-aged man and another teenager unload groceries from a red Ford pick-up.

The hitcher sees this too. She turns to me and I feel her stare. “Where are you from?” she asks, and I am reminded of that scene in Easy Rider when Luke Askew, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper are sitting around a campfire smoking pot and Hopper asks Askew, whom Fonda and Hopper had picked up hitch-hiking earlier that day, where he is from. 

“It’s hard to say,” I tell her, like Askew told Hopper. Because it is true -- I am still trying to figure that out. Not so much where I am from but what I am from.

“What do you mean ‘It’s hard to say’?” she says patiently.

“It’s hard to say because,” as Askew told Hopper, “it’s a very long word.”

Still staring.

“A city,” I tell her.

“Which one?”

 “All cities are alike,” I tell her, as Askew told Hopper.

Unlike Hopper, she says, “No they’re not.”

And like Askew I tell her: “I’m from the city. A long way from the city. And that’s where I wanna be right now.”

She returns to the window. “Next left.”

A Story About a Coyote Story

I return to our table. The hitcher is chatting with our server. In the hitcher’s hand is a black felt pen and in her lap a sketch book open to a drawing of the ficus behind her. The server asks how long it took her to become an artist, and the hitcher says:

“I’ve always been an artist -- I was born that way. When my mother went out she would sit me at the kitchen table with a box of pencil crayons and a roll of paper and I would draw. Sometimes she would tell me a story while making my breakfast and I would draw what I saw in my head. But most times she didn’t and I just followed my hand, adding colours as they occurred to me. Sometimes the drawings didn’t look like anything, and those are the ones I remember best, but not the ones my mother kept.” 

“Abstractions?” says the server enthusiastically.

“You could call them that,” says the hitcher, returning to her drawing, touching it up. “But I’ve never liked that word. Abstractions from what, right? Like they started from people or buildings or landscapes and turned into something that didn’t look like anything?”

A couple comes into the lounge and the server leaves to attend to them.

“What were some of the stories your mother told you?” I ask.

“Oh, you know,” says the hitcher to her sketchbook, “stories from storybooks. Stories she had read to me so many times she knew them by heart.”

I watch as she blacks out the spaces between the leaves of her ficus, bringing the plant closer to her, as if into focus. She blacks out a few leaves and it looks as though a wind is passing through it.

“I remember one story,” she begins, her voice slow with concentration, her ficus now shimmering. “A coyote story about the arrow-trail that the Lower Earth People -- the Animal People -- a chickadee -- made with its bow and arrows to link them to the Upper World Land; how the Grizzly Bear was the last to climb this long line of arrows and broke it; and how the Lower Earth People who were already up there found everything -- all the food -- guarded and then, after suffering many suns, made their way back to the arrow-trail, only to find it was no longer there.”

“How did they get back?” I ask. 

“They jumped,” she says. “Sucker jumped first, thinking the blue part was water, but landed on the rocks beside it, smashing his bones into a million pieces.” She looks up. “That’s why suckers are inedible -- too many bones.” Returning to her drawing she tells me how Bat was next, but was so excited to jump that he forgot his wings and flattened out.

A moment passes. “And that’s why bats--?” I ask.

“That’s why bats are ugly,” she says quickly. “They used to be very handsome.”

Another moment passes before she holds up her drawing, moving it closer to her, then farther, turning it this way and that.

“What about Coyote?”

“Oh yeah,” she says, closing her eyes in concentration. “First Coyote turned himself into a pine needle, which fell fast. Then he became a leaf and floated gently to the ground. Then he returned to his own form.”

I recognize the passage. A recitation of the penultimate paragraph from Mourning Dove’s “The Arrow Trail”, which I read last week after I was introduced to Coyote Stories(1933) by a classmate, Mourning Dove’s great-granddaughter, Corinne Derrickson. “And after that?”

“After that,” the hitcher says closing her eyes again, “the Animal People were content to stay on earth, where they belonged. The breaking of their arrow-trail was the will of the spirit-chief. He did not want the Animal People bothering the people of the Upper World Land again.”

The first thing that occurred to me after reading “The Arrow Trail” was Genesis 11: 1-9, the story of the Tower of Babel. But in Genesis, God’s concern is not with those on Earth mingling with those in Heaven, but of a unified group whose tower would protect them not so much from another flood, but from another Act of God.

God writes:

“6. Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

7. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.

8. So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.”

In 2007, the theologian Theodore Hiebert offered a new interpretation of Genesis 11: 1-9, “arguing that the story ... is exclusively about the origins of cultural difference and not about pride and punishment at all.” I am not sure I buy that. Seems if cultural difference is valued, then why would it be predicated on the dissolution of something as positive as a group who came together to protect their families from floods and physically meet with the deity responsible for them. I share this with the hitcher.

“I don’t know,” she says. “The Bible was not a popular book in my house growing up.”

Masters Thesis Projects

On my way upstairs to defend my Masters Thesis Project (Course Language: How the Reader is Encouraged to Collaborate on Our Seminar and Pass Me) I stopped into FINA Gallery to visit Tania's exhibition. Tania defends tomorrow, and after that we par-tay.